If the Conservatives under Stephen Harper win a plurality of seats — but not a majority — in today’s election, there’s some history that every reporter covering the results (and every citizen, really) ought to know about.

It’s history that Harper wishes journalists would forget — so much so that when he was confronted with it during the 2011 election he denied its significance and attempted to blur the record.

In any election campaign, media narratives become more important as voting day approaches. They act as a counterweight to the ever more frequent advertising fuelled by funds the political parties have husbanded for their final push. Media coverage tends to present a different and seemingly more considered view of the state of play.

Those narratives tend to use polling data as their evidentiary base, but they’re constructed as story arcs to dramatize the players and potential outcomes, giving them life in a way that simple data or horserace handicapping cannot. Story narratives are the way news media try to infuse interest into the repetitive and incremental reality of a campaign.

It may well be that the most competitive election campaign in Canadian history is having an unforeseen consequence — that so many are so utterly focused on the election’s outcome that the campaign itself has become a bit of a sideshow.

Counterintuitively, what should have been gripping because of a virtual dead-heat may not that interesting anymore.

If the economy is the number one concern of voters, they probably didn’t learn as much as they wanted to from last night’s debate.

I’m talking, of course, of those determined few who stuck it out despite a mess of a format, a self-promoting host media organization, a moderator who obviously saw himself as a participant — and the leaders’ own inability to understand what voters want from these debates.

A long time ago, my sister and I watched scary movies together. Whenever the film got to the scariest part, she would always leave the room mumbling something about putting the kettle on.

I feel the same way about political debates. They’re an important part of the political process. But I tend to watch them while slipping in and out of the room, hearing and yet not hearing, worried that something dreadful is about to happen.

Stephen Harper got by with it — again. He did it in his 2011 election interview with Peter Mansbridge, and last week Harper again managed to keep a straight face as he described to the CBC’s chief correspondent his fantasy version of how Canada’s parliamentary democracy works.

The first part of this article dealt with cash transfers promised by Hillary Clinton’s New College Compact to states that commit to lowering tuition at public colleges while maintaining or increasing state funding of post-secondary education.

During a campaign, most potential voters get their political information from four distinct sources: the professional news media (‘earned media’), advertising (‘paid media’), social media (although its impact is still far from clear) and friends and relatives (whose views often are influenced by what they see and read).

Hillary Clinton has put forward a plan to address a major election issue in the U.S.: the record-breaking level of student loan debt. Her plan, called the New College Compact, is an effort to eliminate the need for students at publicly-funded colleges and universities to borrow to pay tuition and to reduce the burden faced by those already repaying their student loans.

I like watching track-and-field events during the Summer Olympics. One year, a young Canadian in one of those middle-distance races did the unthinkable and, instead of pacing with the pack, burst out near the beginning of the race and ran far out in front of the others.

Week five of the federal election campaign saw something every politician dreads and every journalist prays for: the eruption of genuine news.

In what has clearly been a major change in the general news agenda and that of the election campaign, momentum is building hour by hour for Canada to simplify the procedures and increase its absorption of Syrian refugees. The shift, of course, was triggered by the publication of a photo of a dead toddler on a beach — and the questions it raised about Canada’s refugee policy.